Digia To Acquire Qt From Nokia 152
First time accepted submitter MrvFD writes "Ever since the most recent layoffs were announced by Nokia last month and the end of Qt related programs at Nokia was rumored, the fate of Qt has been in the air despite it nowadays having a working open governance model. Fear no longer, Qt brand, since Digia has now announced acquiring the Qt organization from Nokia. While relatively unknown company to the masses, it has already been selling the non-free (non-LGPL) licenses of Qt for 1.5 years. Hopefully this'll mean a bright future for Qt in co-operation with other Qt wielding companies like Google, RIM, Canonical, Intel, Skype, Microsoft, Jolla and the thousands of Qt open source and commercial license users. Digia now plans to quickly enable Qt on Android, iOS and Windows 8 platforms, where work has already been underway for some time."
Good (Score:2, Interesting)
Good to hear. Maybe Digia can also push them to fix a number of the bugs they neglect since it doesn't fit into their mobile device circle jerk that never amounted to anything.
Digia ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Digia ? (Score:5, Informative)
They've been around for more than 15 years so take that for what you will. There is no guarantees that any company won't go under but they seem solid enough.
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They're a small company, mostly focused on ERP, and have a strong alignment with Microsoft. I'd say we can wave goodbye to QT for Linux/KDE in the not too distant future.
For more than ten years, Microsoft has been one of Digia’s key partners. Digia provides its customers with comprehensive solutions based on Microsoft technologies. Digia is actively developing its partnership in line with the Microsoft Partner Network programme.
http://www.digia.com/en/Home/Company/Technology-Partners/ [digia.com]
Pekka is a 3rd generation entrepreneur and founder of Digia, a publicly listed mobile sw-company, listed at NASDAQ OMX Helsinki. In this capacity he now acts as the Head of AppCampus, which is a 18 million euro grant fund established by Aalto University, Nokia and Microsoft.
Re:Digia ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh huh. Except that many of their commercial licenses are contingent on Linux and Unix support hence why Digia continued to suppirt Linux and Unix platforms that Nokia officially dropped support for.
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If you have the source code, what would stop you from building it for Linux? If you need some obscure module, you may have to build from source anyway. Even if they do that, I'll keep using Qt 4 indefinitely. Qt 4.7 does everything I need it to, so it doesn't matter to me.
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oracle didn't even close it. the F/OSS community just didn't like oracle, and when asked to give up control, they refused.
FORK. getting linux users to switch was just as easy as adding a "replaces" line in package management.
Re:Digia ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Their market cap is only about 50 million euro - significantly less than the 104 million euro Nokia paid for Trolltech back in 2008 and you get the rest of Digia for free. I'd wager that Digia paid less than 10 million for this, with Nokia taking a loss of over 90%, maybe even 99%. The thing is, I don't see who'd buy it today. Apple and Android have their own toolkits on mobile, Microsoft and Apple have their own toolkit on desktop so nobody needs it to sell hardware except maybe RIM. Going back to the dual GPL/commercial licensing model is nearly hopeless now that it's gone LGPL, people will fork off the last release and split the community. It's a nice product but I don't see how you'd make money on it.
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Re:Digia ? (Score:4, Informative)
Their market cap is only about 50 million euro - significantly less than the 104 million euro Nokia paid for Trolltech back in 2008 and you get the rest of Digia for free. I'd wager that Digia paid less than 10 million for this, with Nokia taking a loss of over 90%, maybe even 99%. The thing is, I don't see who'd buy it today. Apple and Android have their own toolkits on mobile, Microsoft and Apple have their own toolkit on desktop so nobody needs it to sell hardware except maybe RIM. Going back to the dual GPL/commercial licensing model is nearly hopeless now that it's gone LGPL, people will fork off the last release and split the community. It's a nice product but I don't see how you'd make money on it.
Remember, Nokia bought all of TrollTech. Digia already purchased the Commercial Licensing from Nokia almost a year ago; and now they're purchasing most of the rest - that is, all the stuff that is Qt, but not necessarily all the people. For instance, on the Qt Dev/interest list it was noted they were assuming 125 people from Nokia; of a possible estimate of 150 max - some of which may have already left. And of course the Australian office was already closed by Nokia so they're not assuming that either (though they are getting the quite a bit of the equipment from what I can tell).
So just because they're only paying a fraction of what Nokia paid does not mean that they are actually paying less than Nokia did overall. You'd have to run the numbers and do a good comparison of what is actually getting transferred. If they are taking a loss, it's probably not much.
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That might be true from Digia's point of view, hopefully they got value for their money but from Nokia's point of view they certainly bought something very expensive, produced very little with it and sold the rest for breadcrumbs. Laying off people certainly doesn't provide any revenue. Trolltech had about 250 employees when Nokia bought them, they've laid off a lot, transferred 19 employees in the last agreement and 125 employees now so I don't think there's many unaccounted for. Does Nokia really retain a
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That might be true from Digia's point of view, hopefully they got value for their money but from Nokia's point of view they certainly bought something very expensive, produced very little with it and sold the rest for breadcrumbs. Laying off people certainly doesn't provide any revenue. Trolltech had about 250 employees when Nokia bought them, they've laid off a lot, transferred 19 employees in the last agreement and 125 employees now so I don't think there's many unaccounted for. Does Nokia really retain anything of value from their Trolltech acquisition? If not then the money Digia gave them is all they'll get, the rest is a dead loss.
Very true. To note, many are still working on Qt but have other employers. May be Digia will pick them back up; or may be they'll continue with the new employers. At least it is an equitable relationship - one which Nokia started but destroyed after Elop took over. Any how... back to Qt work...
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They said they're going to make official iOS and Android ports, and also start looking into Win8 and BB10. There is a shortage of portable UI toolkits right now in mobile - there's Mono, but it's not particularly portable on the UI side, and not everyone likes C#.
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Digia [google.co.uk]
Annual Report [digia.com]
Market Cap of â55m so its not as big as say, RedHat, but it is bigger than Nokia... or will be in a few months :)
Incidentally, Nokia bought Qt from Trolltech for â104m... I don't think they sold it for anything near that amount.
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They've been around for more than 15 years so take that for what you will. There is no guarantees that any company won't go under but they seem solid enough.
Except that I'm pretty sure their biggest client was Nokia for most of these 15 years, so good luck to them.
Re:Digia ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is Digia a solid company ? as in: "profitable enough not to get bought in 6 months with Qt changing hands ... again"
Large ? well, depends who you compare to. Large enough when compared to whoever might buy Qt.
Profitable? well, not enough to keep all the employees they acquired and are now acquiring through the qt org. shuffle. part of it is so that Nokia doesn't need to fire the guys(there's rumours that the guys who had been previously transferred to Digia had package offers handed over to them quite soon after the transfer).
Profitability in previous years has been mainly from contracting in fields like Qt programming to Nokia. See the problem there? Digia got majorly fucked by Nokia's switch to Windows Phone and they had acquired a large number of the Qt organization before this already so this is not a surprise. But it remains to be seen if they can turn it profitable, however it's highly likely that they will cut the organization to some degree. During the Nokia days it apparently ballooned to thousands of devs working on Qt(With offices working on it in Finland, UK, Australia.. ), which was not good for Qt but was extremely lucrative to organizations like Digia, so there's some reasoning behind there why Nokia abandoned the platform as it was extremely expensive for them.
Posting as anon as I did a brief stint in the (dis)organization.
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They were whores who were totally dependent on nokia, and when nokia started heading resolutely down the path to doom and gloom last year, digia realised they were fucked, and started YT (co-determination) negotiations before any other consultancy in Finland. (Although only by a couple of days, there was a lot of fuckage at that time (and still is).)
That, and they're a MS house. I think this is bad news for Qt.
in related news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nokia sells patents to a patent troll: suicide by M$ almost complete.
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120809005600/en/Vringo-Nokia-Execute-Patent-Purchase-Agreement [businesswire.com]
That's it for Nokia....all the talent has left, and now they sold the last real assets to a troll. M$'s trail of destruction continues.
- credit to phands on IV for pointing this out.
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BMO
"M$" already gives you off as a neckbeard, but... (Score:2)
Hey, you may be right: who needs the decades of know-how in building great phone hardware, the global logistical network, the long-held relationships with operators and sales channels... This all has been eliminated in a poof of universal Windows Phone hate ('cause everybody thinks about it exactly like you do), where Symbian was not a problem at all.
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Hey, you may be right: who needs the decades of know-how in building great phone hardware, the global logistical network, the long-held relationships with operators and sales channels... This all has been eliminated in a poof of universal Windows Phone hate ('cause everybody thinks about it exactly like you do), where Symbian was not a problem at all.
I don't see very much Windows Phone hate. Mostly I see wonder at how Microsoft could be so late to this party and mild amusement at their struggle to remain relevant in that market. As for the MS/Nokia deal and considering who Nokia's CEO is, it doesn't take much tin foil to realize that something smells bad there.
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Honestly I read his article in Business week where he outlined the logic. The whole thing makes sense. Nokia was desperate and need the cash plus a credible OS to run on their hardware. Balmer wanted the credibility Nokia bought him and had cash. It was a dangerous play but I don't buy it was corrupt. It makes a lot of sense for the board / shareholder's perspective where chewing up the equity and bankruptcy are roughly equivalent.
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Nokia was desperate and need the cash plus a credible OS to run on their hardware.
Except; this was a lie.
If you had just taken Nokia's spare money, put it into a separate company and started building a mobile phone based on Android, recruiting people from scratch, you would have had a very good chance of getting into a major position in the market. It's well worth looking at some of the graphs which show how Nokia's Symbian sales on
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If you had just taken Nokia's spare money, put it into a separate company and started building a mobile phone based on Android, recruiting people from scratch, you would have had a very good chance of getting into a major position in the market
If the shareholders could have easily gotten equity out of Nokia there wouldn't have been a problem. But under the labor rules they had layoffs were going to cost the company a pretty penny. They couldn't get the money out.
Nokia was profitable!
Nokia had increasin
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And you may add one more to that list:
4) The world market for cheap phones - Nokia's bread and butter - is saturating. We have 6 billion cell phone subscriptions now, pretty soon you run out of new people to sell phones to. Nokia will get much less business selling replacements, not to mention the rich buy smartphones saturating the second hand market with cheap but usable dumb/feature phones. Nokia could not afford to stand still.
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Agreed on the market for cheap phones saturating.
On the smartphones, the nice thing for Nokia is that the average life of a smartphone is 11.5 mo. Until that number comes up long lived dumb phones are fine.
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Assume the N9 comes out June 2011 at $550 ballpark comparable to the iPhone 4 though a bit cheaper. [...] How do you sell 100m of those N9s at that price point? I don't see it, so the the N9 is a great phone that sells at best a few million.
Why do I have to assme that?
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The operators were desperate to subsidise the N9 to create a credible an iPhone competitor; the price to customers would have been tens of dollars
I doubt that. The US market is the big subsidy market so lets use the USA. $360 is about where they put the subsidy. No one is getting the $410 type subsidy from iPhone, desperate or not; Nokia customers haven't proven a willingness to overpay for their carrier related costs and accessories. Still if we assume that Nokia could have lived with $370 making it a
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At $200 + 20%, i.e you aren't talking $370 anymore but $250. You pick up a good chunk of the prepay market possible another 30m. At that rate not only do carriers advertise your phone everyone (no charge to Nokia) but they would be willing to do all sorts of incentives for customers like: phone free + first 2 months service free. You sell 50m in the USA easy. Or you kick the price back up to $370 sell 15m and use the $3b in extra revenue to build a first class US application platform.
As far as the car
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OK do you have a source for the $200? Like I said, $200 is an earth changing number, it means that Nokia had a phone that could have easily #1 phone on one of the markets that they traditionally do worst in.
I think the Americans that saw it thought it was great.
Liking European style correlates strongly with social class, education and living on the coasts. Look where Ikea stores are located, and consider that warehouse style stores with low prices are way way more popular in middle America than on the co
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>Nokia was profitable!
True, like RIM was profitable last quarter.
>Nokia had increasing sales! Including increasing sales of "smartphones"!!
Everyone with half a brain cell knew Symbian was not sustainable. Apple and Android were just taking their time in Asia and Europe.
>Nokia had a huge cash mountain (> 5Billion Dollars!!)
That doesn't mean anything really, without data on debt, assets, bonds etc.
>If you had just taken Nokia's spare money, put it into a separate company and started building a
Re:"M$" already gives you off as a neckbeard, but. (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly I read his article in Business week where he outlined the logic. The whole thing makes sense. Nokia was desperate and need the cash plus a credible OS to run on their hardware. Balmer wanted the credibility Nokia bought him and had cash. It was a dangerous play but I don't buy it was corrupt. It makes a lot of sense for the board / shareholder's perspective where chewing up the equity and bankruptcy are roughly equivalent.
Nokia didn't need anything. And in all reality their Maemo/MeeGo devices outsell the Windows Phone devices when in the same markets. They had a credible OS and one they didn't need to pay someone else for. And as someone else pointed out, they were profitable and didn't need the cash. Their ability to remain profitable changed only after they started pursuing Windows at all costs.
If you want to get an accurate picture of what Microsoft and Stephen Elop did - try reading this blog [blogs.com] from a former Nokia Exec that is highly respected in Mobile Phone Sales. You'll see why Nokia is doing so poorly and having to sell off everything, and why Windows Phone will be a no-go (and who made it such).
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And in all reality their Maemo/MeeGo devices outsell the Windows Phone devices when in the same markets.
Their Maemo/MeeGo devices don't sell nearly enough to sustain a company Nokia's size. If Nokia was a small company the N9 would have been awesome. Elop BTW agrees, that they might be able to get the N9 down to around $250 by 2014/2015 and then they do have a viable device. The problem was he didn't have enough money to last that long.
Certainly customers hate the Lumia and that hasn't worked out for N
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And in all reality their Maemo/MeeGo devices outsell the Windows Phone devices when in the same markets.
Their Maemo/MeeGo devices don't sell nearly enough to sustain a company Nokia's size. If Nokia was a small company the N9 would have been awesome. Elop BTW agrees, that they might be able to get the N9 down to around $250 by 2014/2015 and then they do have a viable device.
The N9 and its cousins without any marketing (promotions, discounts, etc.) sold at full price and outsold its Lumia brethren which had millions of dollars in marketing (promotions, discounts, etc.). The Maemo/MeeGo OS also would have run on a lot cheaper devices than they can run the Windows Phone OS on. So I call bull - especially on it coming from Elop. If Nokia pursued Maemo/MeeGo on their phones they could easily have transitioned to it from Symbian. If they had put out the N9 and its brethren in suffic
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The N9 and its cousins without any marketing (promotions, discounts, etc.) sold at full price and outsold its Lumia brethren which had millions of dollars in marketing (promotions, discounts, etc.).
It's a myth made out of thin air and circular web references.
The Maemo/MeeGo OS also would have run on a lot cheaper devices than they can run the Windows Phone OS on.
Tall tales from the fandom, too. Earlier N9 prototypes had 512 MiB of RAM; they had to bump it to 1 GiB because the software couldn't be fit to run without endless swapping. Windows Phone 7 has no problem running on half a gig even now.
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We agree that the N9 is a really cool phone with potential and that the Lumia was a phone that customers hate. I also will stipulate that with a promotional campaign Nokia could have sold 10m of the N9 easily. The question is all about how cheaply could they make 100m of them. Nokia seems to be building the Lumia 900 at about $450 each. I have no idea who they are spending that much given that this is over what Apple spends to build the iPhone 4S with considerably better hardware specs. But that seems
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Short-sightenness. They didn't see their strategy through. No Maemo/MeeGo phone had been released yet; and nothing had been built up yet. They were probably talking with Ballmer and Elop at that point as well, and getting a lot of FUD from those circles on why Maemo/MeeGo wouldn't go.
The de
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Short-sightenness. They didn't see their strategy through. No Maemo/MeeGo phone had been released yet; and nothing had been built up yet. They were probably talking with Ballmer and Elop at that point as well, and getting a lot of FUD from those circles on why Maemo/MeeGo wouldn't go.
Unless Elop and Balmer are lying that's not possible. Elop approached Balmer after he realized the MeeGo strategy wasn't viable. Balmer may not have even known how unhappy Elop and the board were with MeeGo when the threw
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While about 5% of what Ahonen says is insightful, about 95% of it is just inane gibbering. His blog is best avoided.
In this case, that specific blog post would be in the 5%. A lot of what he's stated I've been seeing in other areas where I deal with Nokia or Nokia personnel.
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I don't see very much Windows Phone hate.
I have to agree, i see a lot of mocking about how it has low marketshare, but not much in the way of objective criticism. The biggest problem was they were too late to the party so people are already familiar with Android and iOS as the defacto choice.
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FYI, it was a poor choice because the OS sucked, was outdated and already had a shrinking market share after many
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decades of building great phone hardware which then had to be scaled back because the OS didn't support current hardware
By "current hardware" you must mean multi-core CPUs, which Nokia hasn't yet put on any device? Neither did they go beyond 800x600 screens. The cameras in top-tier Lumias are pretty adequate. So, there was nothing to scale back.
and then 2 years after the deal a new version is forced on them which is incompatible. That's great for the hardware designers, great for their global logistics network, great for their operator and sales channels.
It's not great, but neither it is a big issue. Not all users are novelty junkies, and WP7 devices don't suddenly stop being useful because there's a new version out. Ask the users of all the dirt-cheap Gingerbread phones that are pumping up Android sales statistics.
FYI, it was a poor choice because the OS sucked, was outdated and already had a shrinking market share after many years on the market.
I see you are confu
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By "current hardware" you must mean multi-core CPUs, which Nokia hasn't yet put on any device? Neither did they go beyond 800x600 screens. The cameras in top-tier Lumias are pretty adequate. So, there was nothing to scale back.
You are an idiot. Reparse the sentence. He's saying Nokia essentially stopped dead in its tracks with windows phone. The GP is talking about decades of Nokia building great hardware [that continually push the boundaries of what is possible]. They have been stuck with variations of the same windows phone specced shit since they delivered the first Lumia. And since "there is no plan B", they weren't about to just put Symbian or Meego on some real high spec stuff. Oh no, fuck making money when we Nokia c
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He's saying Nokia essentially stopped dead in its tracks with windows phone. The GP is talking about decades of Nokia building great hardware [that continually push the boundaries of what is possible].
Um, your reading between the lines of the GP is a bit too rosy. I don't remember Nokia ever creating anything exceptional, just many things that were damn good for their day. Like Lumia 900, for example.
They have been stuck with variations of the same windows phone specced shit since they delivered the first Lumia. And since "there is no plan B", they weren't about to just put Symbian or Meego on some real high spec stuff.
Right, because high specs is the only thing that sells, who needs software that doesn't make you furious while using it?
All the while the rest of the industry has moved forward with HD screens, dual-sim handsets, and with native coding and high performance GPUs the ability to play honest to goodness real 3D games.
I'll give you that: with Windows Phone, Nokia is not yet in a position to collect the stupid money spent on unnecessary things (dual SIM works fine on S40 at the price points where it reall
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Um, your reading between the lines of the GP is a bit too rosy. I don't remember Nokia ever creating anything exceptional just many things that were damn good for their day
The OP said "decades of building great phones which then had to be scaled back because the OS didn't support current hardware" Obviously "building great phones" in that sentence is what had to be scaled back and not the actual hardware itself and the only way for the entire phrase to be logically consistent is if OP was referring to the state of being a great phone maker rather than any specific phone. Taking his statement at face value, my interpretation is more likely as it is consistent with both facts
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So what's stupid? HD screens? I have to look at that screen everyday for the duration of my ownership of the phone and I want it to be a good one. And if you amortized the additional cost of the screen over the life of the contract it would be pennies a day. Of all the specs that you can't see that probably don't really matter that much, you bring up the one thing that makes a clear difference.
I can't see it. Literally. I have a good vision, but there's nothing that pops out on me as badly pixelated on 800x480 screens. Small fonts in the browser are sometimes difficult to see... because they are just rendered damn too small, physically. Use the zoom feature, your eyes will thank you for it whether you have a "stupid money" display or not.
It may never cross your mind, but there are people buying a phone that has everything to fulfill their current needs, that's it.
But that's a fallacy and a perfect example of your mind playing tricks on you. Human nature leads you to exaggerate the importance of the present over future utility. A phone can "fulfill your current needs" and still be a bad deal because you are stuck with the phone until your contract is up.
It's a fallacy to assume that I'm a prey of US mobile operators. I'm not tied to a contract, I can change my unsubsidised phone any day. If you buy into a two-ye
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"Hey, you may be right: who needs the decades of know-how in building great phone hardware, the global logistical network"
Both Apple and Samsung have better logistics networks and are able to get components cheaper. Nokia's logistic network has been decimated over the past year or two.
"the long-held relationships with operators"
They are reducing the number of operators....
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/07/if-apple-is-running-away-from-this-strategy-and-samsung-growing-by-opposite-strategy [blogs.com]
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I'm not saying Nokia is at the top of its game now, but those things are worth something, and they can be improved, unless we all believe in made-up stories such as the "Elop effect" and market rejection of Lumia phones.
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- credit to phands on IV for pointing this out.
What's IV?
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>What's IV?
Investor Village
--
BMO
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Nokia sells patents to a patent troll: suicide by M$ almost complete.
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120809005600/en/Vringo-Nokia-Execute-Patent-Purchase-Agreement [businesswire.com]
That's it for Nokia....all the talent has left, and now they sold the last real assets to a troll. M$'s trail of destruction continues.
- credit to phands on IV for pointing this out.
--
BMO
Last real assets? Get real.
Those are just a miniscule 500 of the tens of thousands of patents that Nokia holds. Barely a drop in the bucket.
Phands? Is that the same phands who frequents Yahoo Message Boards and trolls them with foul mouthed language? I am not surprised you're hooking up with him/it.
On the other hand, I should've just stopped reading at 'M$'. Usually what follows is juvenile junk, and your post did not fail to disappoint. As usual, no references to back your outlandish claims based on headli
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'..suicide by M$'? Maybe you mean homicide.
That was a cut and paste job from Phands' post on the IV SCOX board, but I happen to agree with it.
The board of directors had to approve Elop. It was suicide. "Microsoft cannibalizes its partners? Oh no, that won't happen to us!"
Delusional thinking by the board of directors at best.
I said before that one of Microsoft's strategies is to "cut off the oxygen" of competing companies. They have failed to be able to do that in this century, and what they've had a hab
rename Digia as Trolltech (Score:5, Insightful)
Good.
Now Digia should acquire the Trolltech trademark as well if they haven't, and rebrand themselves as Trolltech. Then everyone could forget Nokia ever happened.
Re:rename Digia as Trolltech (Score:4, Insightful)
If Nokia never happened, there wouldn't have been an LGPL version of Qt.
1.5years means the deal was made with Microsoft (Score:2)
Since the late 1980s, I've never seen Microsoft not want to shut down a cross platform development platform of any appreciable size. I doubt very much the Nokia deals were the first and especially not with Elop at the he
Re:1.5years means the deal was made with Microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't really matter Qt is under open governance. And if the toolkit is failed to be released, it all goes BSD. So begin that speculation. If MS "killed" Qt, it would free it. MS has two possible position here: .NET.
1. Qt as LGPL or commercial. This limits Qt more than:
2. Qt as BSD. A top-notch C++ library that runs on all platforms would be competition to
I believe that #2 is the worst outcome for MS, especially given their failing position in approval (Win 8, Win Phone). The only benefit to #2 for MS is they can run Qt themselves, but they won't because .NET is their baby.
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Lets look at MS challenges:
1) The release of the Surface is saying fuck you to their channel. Acer CEO just reacted to the Surface announcement by saying they would look at alternatives such as Android.
2) All of MS's recent announcements surround Metro UI, ARM tablets, and Cloud services.
3) .NET and all of the related PC based services will continue to be supported and evolved. MS will not kill off their bread and butter business until people start eating their new cupcakes in mass volume.
4) Qt? Microsoft d
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dotnet was there baby now WinRT with HTML5/CSS/Javascript is the baby. wait a week qt might be next
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You mean QML. :-)
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Seriously, it's still not too difficult to keep it from growing outside of the free/open source side of things and withou
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There is. Digia has varied interests. And increasing Qt licenses is one of them.
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LoB
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Where does this bullshit continue to come from? .Net isn't going anywhere - .Net 4.5 is due for RTM in a couple weeks, .Net 5.0 is under development and .Net (5.5/6.0) is being talked about. .Net is a first class environment in Windows 8 - this bullshit about it being dumped only came about because an MS rep refused to talk about .Net in any depth at a conference based around something completely different. Somehow that got misconstrued (perhaps deliberately, if some people are continuing to propagate the
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Bear in mind Microsoft said exactly the same things about Silverlight. The initial issues came from Build 2011 where all the technical streams were about C++ and HTML, .NET was rarely mentioned. That made people think MS's focus was no longer .NET. I think it was Mary-Jo Foley who reported this initially.
I doubt .NET is going away, but its no longer the first-class development platform that sucks up all the MS development resources. You could think of it as the 'new VB'. What you cannot think of it as is th
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Not being mentioned is not the same as dropping - and the situation was clarified in the days after the story was "broken", so why are people still posting bullshit about it a year later? FUD, thats why.
Microsofts effort on C++ is not replacing .Net - it's being brought up to the same level of development effort so it can stand beside .Net as a development environment rather than staying as the step child that it had become in recent years. They were bringing it up to scratch because people wanted it, not
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So, for Win8 .Net seems to be getting scaled back quite considerably as to really be that first class citizen it needs to be using the WinRT APIs - avoiding nearly all of Win32, etc. And of course if you want your app in the Windows App Store, then it has to do that too. As a result, expect to have a split in .Net - one that supports Win32 for "classic" desktop, and one that supports WinRT for Win8 platforms.
That split has already existed between desktop .NET and Silverlight/WinPhone. In fact, the subset of .NET in WinRT apps is very close to what it was in Silverlight.
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Microsoft has been rather inconsistent in their developer announcements for years. They've been changing their roadmaps frequently. I don't think it is unreasonable that people are starring to speculate.
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That reason alone is why people should switch to Qt. I remember when in 2001 MS Posix support was jsut good enough that you could write posix programs in windows and unix. Then they came out with .NET, which re-invented the wheel, which has Windows Forms and WPF and old school MFC ways of making an app. (Java did it too with Swing and AWT). Qt now has two itself - C++ and QML, but the idea is they don't skin the same kind of cat.
With MS you have to continually learn the latest and greatest. With Qt you neve
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Jesus H. Christ, how long are you guys going to parrot this nonsense? Is this some sort of anti-.NET marketing strategy being pushed by competitors or something? Microsoft is not killing .NET. They never said they were killing .NET. They have a new version on the horizon, and even further out still, more versions in the works.
All this because of one talk that wasn't centered on .NET. It's amazing how the world freaks out over absolutely nothing.
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Yes it could go BSD if it was completely dropped. But if it was a benefit to Windows for it to die off and not go to a BSD license then they just need to pay the company now manag
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LoB
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LoB
The greatness of Qt (Score:4, Interesting)
It really is a shame that Qt has languished in relative obscurity for so many years. It really is a great toolkit (and I say that as a non-programmer who has only dabbled with it).
It's relatively simple, consistent, and has a large number of Windows-like constructor tools. It can be easily bound with many different other languages to construct a working program in a fairly short period of time. It's cross platform, running on everything*. The CPU overhead is relatively negligible (sans a massive framework like KDE).
It really astounds me that it's remained so cursory over the past decade or so. We had things like Qtopia way back in '00, and then it kind of went nowhere, even though there have been a lot of promising projects where it's been used - it's just fallen short of dominating like I'd have expected it to have. For instance, it was used in Maemo - but then replaced with something GTK-based. Why?
Re:The greatness of Qt (Score:4, Informative)
How is it 'obscure'? It's widely used in large and small commercial companies worldwide. It might be obscure for an average user but they don't really care about such details.
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For instance, it was used in Maemo - but then replaced with something GTK-based.
You got that the wrong way around. Maemo used GTK until the Fremantle release, but switched to Qt for Harmattan.
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Unfortunately for Gtk+, vanilla C is not good enough.
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Unfortunately for Gtk+, vanilla C is not good enough.
That's why we have both it and Vala.
Qt: the missed opportunity (Score:5, Interesting)
Nokia has really shot itself in the foot. They could have pushed the porting effort to get Qt on Android and then get a nice native app ecosystem going but instead they went the (classically) shortsighted take-the-money route with Microsoft. Now they are stuck with this burden called Windows 8 Phone which is on a whooping 4% of cell phones. Windows 8 Phone just needs some apps, right? Well it's bad enough to come into the game late but when you have a hostile environment for developers (developers! developers!) you are not going to get anything but crappy ports from Android or iOS from developers that dont know any better.
It seems this culture of CEOs/board members coming and going on a regular basis has made corporate investments shortsighted.
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* Always have a "New, Better" way of doing things: .NET, Windows forms, WPF, Silverlight, Now whatever Win8 metro apps are in.
Win32, MFC,
* You can develop on the platform for free, but they make it hard.
"Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!" And they want to charge us to develop on their platform? Contrast to free development on all other platforms. Eclipse alone is reason enough.
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According to Elop, Nokia was bleeding equity fast. He had to be shortsighted they didn't have enough money to last enough years to do it right.
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Believe him if you want to. Politicians aren't the only professional liars.
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Now they are stuck with this burden called Windows 8 Phone which is on a whooping 4% of cell phones.
There's no such thing as a "Windows 8 Phone". There's "Windows Phone 8", but there aren't any cell phones with it, since it's not released yet.
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There's "Windows Phone 8", but there aren't any cell phones with it, since it's not released yet.
You think they'll release it without ever having tried it on any hardware?
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Testing is a different thing. The person to whom I replied was clearly referring to phones in the hands of actual customers. There aren't any such WP8 phones for obvious reasons.
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But isn't Windows 8 still in testing? Or did you mean that no manufacturers have announced Windows 8 phones yet? (I'm assuming, I have no interest in the market other than to watch Nokia confirm my deal-with-the-devil presumptions)
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First of all, Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 are two different OSes. They do share some code, most notably the kernel, but the difference there is greater than the similarity (way more than XP/2003 or Vista/2008, for example).
Windows 8 is not in testing anymore, since an RTM image has been created - it's just not publicly released yet (will be on August 15 for MSDN/TechNet subscribers). That said, it's different from WP8, since once you have the image, you can install and run it on any existing PC. I have it
IOS and Android good; corporations bad (Score:2)
"So if we open the source we can force people to use our code?"
"If we stop development won't people just keep buying the same old buggy junk?" "So the L in LGPL means they buy a license?" "Can we patent C++?"
"How much did we p
Good Thing (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a good thing. The best thing for Qt is for it to be owned by someone whose business depends on it. I worked for a firm that, for legal reasons, had a commercial license from Digia, and I attended the Qt Dev Days in SF in 2011. I was impressed with what I saw. Digia seemed like a good company. I hope they can make a go of it.
A shame (Score:2)
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They lacked people with enough vision and sufficiently empowered to make something unique. Maemo/MeeGo sunk into a morass, Elop just delivered a coup de grace.
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Embarcado bought CodeGear not Borland. CodeGear being the spunoff company from Borland to handle Delphi/C++ Builder, etc. Borland was bought by Micro Focus.
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A company I've never heard of to acquire something I've never heard of from a company going out of business. Nice.
Just because you've never heard of it, doesn't mean it's not important. Are you sure you're reading the right newsfeed?
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Yes. An excellent analogy.
But for now the question is "What does this mean for Qt?" I really doubt that the company is currently a patent troll. OTOH, the posts about where it has been getting its money aren't reassuring, and they may be driven to it. The gripping hand is that the LGPL is powerful magic. On the fourth hand, running a major project like Qt isn't something that can be set up quickly and do well. What percentage of the developers are external to the company? (My guess is rather few, per
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What?? There was world wide financial collapse??? When did that happen??? Guess it's not important because I didn't know about it.
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You've never heard about Qt? Seriously?
Quicktime? Sure, I've heard of that.
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Mod the parent as funny.